Orson Welles filmed
the sleigh-ride scene for The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) neither
in a studio nor on location. He insisted on building his set inside the
largest available refrigeration plant. The landscape he required could
have been simulated at RKO just as convincingly and much cheaper. What
could justify such costly self-indulgence? What gain could it possibly
bring to the film? Were Welles’ actors so incompetent that they needed
to be frozen stiff before they could bring conviction to a winter scene?

There is an answer,
and it is visible on the screen. In sub-zero conditions, unlike those
on a hot soundstage, the breath of players (and ponies) freezes in the
air to a visible vapour. That is an important effect, since it goes with
the soft white landscape to make the scene felt as one of natural purity.
The sharp freshness of its air, made present this way, provides an all-the-more
telling site for the appearance of the horseless carriage. Here, in a
scene whose nervous jollity is only touched with foreboding. It is a joke
that the vehicle sullies the countryside with racket and filth. But there
is nothing frivolous about the contrast between the heavy black fumes
of the machine and the silvery human breaths that vanish on the air. It
states the vulnerability of the complacent small-town aristocracy to the
impact of a new technology.

The very breath of
an actor can be made significant when the director places it in an expressive
relationship with the other aspects of the scene. It can contribute to
the effectiveness of the moment – building the sense of a threatened and
fleeting purity – and it can establish a visual theme: the Amberson life-style
is progressively submerged in an industrial wilderness of smoke, metal,
speed and mechanical din. Though the choices are seldom as costly (and
only sometimes as rewarding as Welles’ here, directing a film is always
about making choices of this kind – hundreds of them every day and at
every stage in the translation from script to screen.

Many of the choices
are matters of craft. The director works to make the scenes vivid and
varied, so as to achieve an arresting presentation of the characters and
their story. Flaws in the casting may have to be disguised. Dull spots
in the writing and sagging passages in the construction of the screenplay
may need to be enlivened. Cunning may be required to stretch limited resources:
in Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), Max Ophuls had to construct
the living world of late nineteenth century Linz on the back-lot set that
Universal had been keeping going as an all-purpose Mittel-Europa exterior
since All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).

The most promising
script, judiciously cast, will still fall flat if the director is unable
to get all the elements of the production working together – either in
harmony or in lively contrast – so that the end result flows when it is
played to an audience. If it does not work on the screen, we are likely
to think that there was not much of a story or that the performances were
lacking. But often the fault lies in the director’s inability to find
a style that brings the material convincingly to life. Just as often,
it is the director who should take the credit for our belief that we have
seen a credible and forceful story with colourful and engaging characterisation.
In terms of the package and its ingredients, there is not much that separates
The Reckless Moment (1949), Johnny Guitar (1954) or Written
on the Wind (1956) from dozens of mediocre products of the Hollywood
machine. The crucial factor is the direction of Max Ophuls, Nicholas Ray
and Douglas Sirk.

Old Hollywood was well
aware how much its product stood to gain, as entertainment, from a style
that rendered its drama effectively and made it look, move and sound as
if it had a sense of direction.

It expected directors
to be capable production managers and to complete their work on time,
on budget and without major damage to studio morale. But it also valued
and rewarded the ability to control performance, image and editing so
as to create moods and viewpoints through which the story could persuade
and grip the audience.

Very seldom would a
director’s career suffer from a noisy insistence on getting a particular
fabric for the set, a particular lens for the camera or a particular casting
for an apparently insignificant role. Directors were paid to believe that
every little thing mattered – and to prove it by their results.

One minor instance
is the choice of props. At the start of Nicholas Ray’s Party Girl
(1958), chorus-girl prostitutes are paid for their services at boss Rico
Angelo’s party with a gift of powder compacts. The glittering compacts
are discarded as soon as they have been emptied of the $100 bills inside.
Later Rico settles accounts, at a presentation dinner for his ‘ambitious’
underling, Frankie Gasto, by beating him about he head with a gold-plated
miniature pool-cue inscribed ‘From Rico to Frankie’. At the film’s climax,
Rico’s threat to disfigure the heroine is teasingly developed as he unpicks
the tinsel and tissue wrapping from a bottle of acid. Throughout the picture,
then, elaborate gift-wrapping serves as a cover for payments, bribes,
assaults, and threats. Ray presents an image of gangland Chicago as a
world of disguise whose characters are constantly hiding the true nature
of their transactions from themselves as well as from others. The props
are one means through which he was able to remodel a fairly routine gangster
assignment into a film about pretexts.

If objects may be dressed,
performers nearly always are. Dress offers the characters’ conscious or
unconscious self-presentation and may define social role or financial
circumstance. A fur coat provides Max Ophuls with an image for the rewards
and limitations of the role of bourgeois housewife in The Reckless
Moment.Although the coat is ‘her own’, Mrs Harper (Joan Bennett)
cannot dispose of it at a point when she is in desperate need of cash.
It is too much part of her uniform, her identity, as the wife of a successful
architect. A vital moment is conveyed when she manages to persuade her
hitherto rebellious daughter to borrow it: she has at last cast her offspring
into the ‘womanly’ role of decorative servitude. The daughter can now
be sent out into the world – or to the movies with the ‘boy next door’
– as a replica of her dutiful mother.

The same director in
Caught (1948), uses three different coats to depict the options
open to his indecisive heroine: the extravagant mink of a Long Island
hostess; a plastic mac for the poor-but-honest nurse; and a ‘sensible’
cloth coat, warm and becoming but not showy, for the unassumingly loyal
doctor’s wife. The use of dress here goes beyond working as a simple but
effective visual presentation of changing circumstances. It helps also
to define an attitude to those changes. What is important is that none
of the garments represents the heroine’s ‘natural’ character. Each of
them gives her a role which she will try, or be forced, to live in.

Dress is a vital element
in deciding how the film will look. But it is only one element, and its
design needs to be related to the visual context determined by the choice
of locations and the construction of sets. In Some Came Running
(1958), the textures and colours of the décor stake out three different
worlds in which the hero moves. In the downtown section, the director
Vincente Minnelli said, he wanted the audience to feel that it was living
inside a juke-box. The design yields a raucous contest between harsh metallic
colours.

A justly famous scene
in La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939)
gains much of its effect from Renoir’s use of décor. At the start
of a country house party, the aristocratic hostess, Christine, is obliged
to confront the gossip surrounding her relationship with a young aviator.
André Jurieu. She does this by introducing him to her other guests
as a group with a speech in praise of pure friendship. The scene is set
in the château’s entrance hall and the décor is a perfectly
credible arrangement of doors, pillars and open space. But Renoir’s disposition
of his actors and camera turns the space into a theatrical arena as Christine
takes André ‘centre stage’ to present him to the others, grouped
at a little distance to constitute the audience, while her husband and
his friend look on anxiously and at last proudly from ‘the wings’. The
sense of Christine’s performance as one governed by strict rules, where
a wrong move threatens disaster, emerges from another visual parallel
that the décor permits: the camera sees the floor, with Christine
and André moving across its black-and-white marble tiles, as a
chess-board. The power of the scene largely derives from the tension between
Christine’s nervously awkward sincerity and the demand implied by the
theatre/chess-game image for the precise execution of a delicate manoeuvre.

Physical aspects of
production like décor and dress can help the actors to feel themselves
into their roles. But the detail of performance that brings the characters
to life – movement, gesture, intonation, rhythm – has to be established
on the set. Here the director’s job is, particularly, to hold each and
every moment of performance within a vision of the scene as a whole so
that the impact and effectiveness of today’s scene is not achieved
at the expense of what was filmed last week or what remains to be shot.
The continuity of the end product is, most often, an impression that has
to be constructed and protected in spite of the radically discontinuous
method of shooting. (The first day’s work may be on scenes from the final
pages of the script, and the leading man may be speaking his lines to
an off-screen heroine who is due to join the production in a fortnight’s
time.) The pacing of a scene may seem just right in itself, but how will
it look when the audience reaches it halfway through the film? Directors
work in the knowledge that nothing is right ‘in itself’ but only in relation
to the developing design. Balance and proportion are crucial.

The task here begins
with the casting. The famous Hollywood ‘chemistry’ was usually publicized
as an aspect of star teams like Hepburn and Tracy; but it applies to all
casting, right down to the smallest roles. When the young fugitives get
married in Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948), the scene
exploits, in systematic parody, all the elements of the conventional presentation
of a white wedding. The casting of Hawkins, the local justice, whose business
is marriage, is clearly crucial. Greed – extortionate greed leaning towards
but never quite toppling over into criminality – is what the character
must mainly evoke. Conventional casting would therefore suggest a fat
man whose figure could represent an unrelentingly capacious appetite.
By giving the role against type to scrawny, piping-voiced Ian Wolfe –
a starved sparrow rather than a satiated vulture – Ray shades the notion
of greed away from indulgent avarice and makes it an anxious habit born
of insecurity.

The casting of the
star parts is a matter on which the director might or might not be consulted.
For instance, Max Ophuls did not first agree to direct Letter From
an Unknown Woman and then decide that the heroine’s role should be
offered to Joan Fontaine. He had to decide whether he wanted to make the
film, given that Fontaine was to play the lead. In case of conflict, the
producer carries more weight over casting decisions than the director:
Ray had to accept Germany’s top star, Curt Jurgens, as a British officer
in his World War II film, Bitter Victory (1957). More often than
not, the director’s notion of ideal casting for leading parts will be
compromised by the constraints of schedule and budget.

Once on the set, however,
directors have all the freedom that their imagination, tact and persuasiveness
can provide. Large statements can be made with small gestures. In the
opening scene of Caught, the car-hop heroine is apparently sharing
a harmless dream with her flat-mate when she fantasises a chance meeting
with a handsome young millionaire. But what is calculating and predatory
in this innocence is conveyed by her punctuating her words by making idle
passes with a fly-swat while lying open-legged on the bed. What is blind
in her calculation, too, emerges from her complete inattention to her
own gestures and their evident meanings.

Suppose that you were
planning the first few minutes of a film whose central issue is to be
the uncertainty of emotion, a story of passion dogged by mistrust in which
only the strength of feeling (not its nature) remains constant. You want
to establish that neither hero nor heroine is sure whether the man’s embrace
is protective and loving or threatening, murderous.

That was Ray’s problem
at the start of In a Lonely Place (1950). His answer was to give
the same gesture to three different characters within the brief space
of the scene that establishes the film’s Hollywood setting: each of them
approaches another character from behind and grasps his shoulders with
both hands. The first time, it is a perfunctory and patronizing greeting
whose pretense of warmth is a bare cover for the assertion of superiority.
Then, between the hero and an old friend, it conveys intimacy and genuine
regard. Finally, when a large-mouthed producer uses the shoulders of the
hero himself as a rostrum from which to publicize his latest triumph,
it is seen as oppressive and openly slighting. These moments are significant
in their own right, but their deeper purpose is – in a perfectly ordinary
context – to dramatise the ambiguity of gesture itself.

The work of film direction,
as it has so far been considered, is not fundamentally different from
that of directing for the stage. But in movies everything is designed
to be filtered through the eye of the camera and remade in the patterns
created on the cutting bench. Just how far a characterization may result
from the director’s control over camera – even when the role is as well
cast and expertly played as Judith Anderson’s menacing housekeeper, Mrs
Danvers, in Rebecca (1940) – is nicely indicated by Hitchcock’s
description of his design.

He said that the figure
of Mrs Danvers: ‘... was rarely shown in motion. If she entered a room
in which the heroine was, what happened is that the girl suddenly heard
a sound and there was the ever-present Mrs Danvers, standing perfectly
still by her side ... To have shown Mrs Danvers walking about would have
been to humanise her.’

The camera’s frame
and the editor’s scissors provide the means whereby the director carves
a particular path through the world constructed on the set. Thus at the
start of Ray’s rodeo picture, The Lusty Men (1952), we are shown
a selection of the displays in the opening-day parade through the centre
of a modern Texan town. The camera’s viewpoint constantly encompasses
the solid fronts of banks, shops and offices as the permanent background
of the passing show. Then, in ordering the succession of images, Ray moves
systematically back through time, taking us from tractors and decorated
lorries, through covered wagons and mule trains, to a band of fancy-dress
Indians war-dancing along the city streets. When we get to the rodeo itself,
the film has set it up as a show that attempts to extend the life of images
from the past in a drastically transformed present.

Selection and sequence
are the keys to viewpoint that the director controls. It is a strategic
decision, for instance, never to identify members of the rodeo’s audience
as individuals but always to view the spectators distantly as an anonymous
mass. The place that might be occupied by shots of audience reaction is
taken by images of the professionals in the commentary box, and of the
harshly impersonal metallic cones of the arena’s loudspeaker system. The
audience becomes one large component of a machine whose appetite is spectacle
and danger, and which runs without regard for the particular human material
it devours.

Cutting and camera
movement are both means through which direction shifts and manipulates
viewpoint. Yet their effects, the kinds of statements they make, are very
different. To cut from one object to another is to assert continuity across
a chopped-up time and space. Hitchcock does this spectacularly in Strangers
on a Train (1951). His montage makes a single sequence out of contrasted
events in two towns and on different time-scales: the hero’s battle in
a tennis tournament is intercut with the villain’s struggle to regain
possession of an incriminating cigarette lighter.

To shift the frame
via camera movement, on the other hand, is to impose an order of perception
on objects which exist in a continuous time and space so that they could,
in principle, be seen all at once. The Lusty Men, Ray introduces
his rodeo-star hero in a shot which starts with the camera looking in
through the gate of a bull-pen. The animal charges along its track to
halt at the gate with its eyes glinting in fierce close-up. At this the
image tilts upwards to frame Mitchum above the animal, preparing to mount.
A direct contrast is drawn between two kinds of strength – the power of
a natural force, and the force of human determination. But the camera’s
movement links these two images in comparison as well as contrast. For
all his apparent mastery, as we look up to him outlined against the sky,
Robert Mitchum is like the bull in being contained within the structures
of the rodeo: his image, too, is framed, hemmed in, by the wooden posts
of the bull-pen.

The movement and angle
of the shot give a precisely calculated degree of overstatement to the
assertion of mastery. Within fifteen seconds Mitchum will be floundering,
injured, in the dirt of the arena. His previous inward smile of self-satisfaction
at the commentator’s tribute to his prowess, his pose of confident virility
as he tightens his belt on the words ‘one of the all-time rodeo greats’
are opened up to irony by the camera’s too hearty endorsement of his supremacy.

Ironic overstatement
like this is a possibility for the director because the expansiveness
of a film style is so much a matter of balance, of what happens when you
put together, in a particular way, a posture, a facial expression, an
off-screen voice and a camera viewpoint. At the very centre of the director’s
job is this task of co-ordination. Direction works with the various talents
of highly skilled artists to ensure their contributions meet in a coherent
design. The photographer may devise ingenious ways of lighting a confined
space so as to give it a sense of room and air. The ingenuity will yield
little if the designer has been working to develop an image of claustrophobia.

In post-war Hollywood,
directors often enjoyed considerable freedom within their assignments
– much more than their freedom to choose and develop subjects or to initiate
production. So long as they were thought to be making the best possible
job of the given package of story, stars and resources, they were likely
to meet with little resistance to their ideas about how a film should
look, sound and move.

But even this freedom
has strict limits. Those were still the days of the classic approach which
valued formal design only so long as it supported the spectator’s involvement,
understanding, pleasure and belief in the narrative. Moreover, quite strict
notions of what was appropriate were in play. A brasher, gaudier array
of colour was thought suitable for musicals than for, say, light comedy.
Melodrama which aimed to carry its audience over the top, with heightened
situations and excessive passions, offered a corresponding licence to
explore the possibilities of a flamboyant visual rhetoric.

Many directors seem
to have lived quite happily within these prescriptions, being ready to
exert their skills within a range of genres to achieve effective versions
of the accepted manner. The limitation of such adaptable know-how was
that it would seldom carry a film beyond the qualities of the package
originally handed down by the studio. A movie directed by, say, Michael
Curtiz would be neither more nor less than the sum of its carefully blended
ingredients. Sometimes that was enough. It is no mean praise to say that
Casablanca (1942) was as good as its script and cast.

But it is probably
fair to claim that Curtiz’s best films achieve a dramatically effective
manner, rather than a style. The various elements of the film are
harnessed only to a reliable judgement of what will make the story work.
More is possible. The films of Ophuls, Ray and Sirk, among others, are
there to demonstrate how, with no sacrifice of movie-craft, the director
can bind the movie together in a design that offers a more personal and
detailed conception of the story’s significance, embodying an experience
of the world and a viewpoint both considered and felt. At this point,
manner becomes style.

First
published in The Movie, no. 58 (Orbis Publishing, 1981). Reprinted
with permission of the author.